Statues made of sand. Who’s coming down and what’s going up…

Statues are made of sand. Let them tumble down. Whoever was great once was not meant to last.

What sand dunes will be put atop the pedestal. Who is great today, who will be greater tomorrow?

An easy guess is Obama, inoffensive and abounding in symbols, carve in some babbling rhetoric and that’s one up, thousands more to go.

The next easy pick, odds are so high that no bookie will take the bet, are music stars and actors. They already have the other mediums of mythology locked up and hoisting their sand up will be celebrated. Jay Z did something or other, so did Beyoncé. They’re all about the ‘gotta get mine’ and big chunks of bling are aspirational.

Then we got the athletes. They ‘gotta get mine’ also and are by and large more civic-minded. Many are walking, talking public service announcements in their public life.

That was all low hanging fruit picks. Here’s the stuff on high. You many not like what’s going up, but it’s going to happen. Write it down and put it on your refrigerated time capsule.

Two new categories…

l. Social disruptors, insurgents, terrorists, gang members and the combatants in fourth generation warfare. Warriors that do not confront a nation-state’s military, rather they corrode, weaken and attack it with terror, massive infrastructure damage and societal cohesion.

Open sourced insurgencies are loose decentralized networks with one organizing principle: disrupt the status quo. They will lever the politics of identity to establish moral authority. Their battles big and small are won in the moral sphere, destroying moral bonds that allows the organic whole to exist.

There will be battles for scarce public resources as groups battle to gain privileges, statist systems versus decentralized systems and not enough money to go around and bribe the mobs. The state will lose its monopoly on violence. The revolution will be televised, but it will also be self-censored

Insurgencies find charismatic leaders, infiltrators that win in their respective skirmishes, then gain popular support, sympathies, and use social media to amplify their messaging and recruit new members. Media will make them stars, pundits and commentators. We will have plenty of Muqtada al-Sadr‘s

2. Bot people. A bot is a term used to describe any intelligent system (aka machine intelligence) that can work autonomously. Bots will automate everything you do, granularly, one blink, smile, handshake, bead of sweat, button push and email at a time.

Hundreds of millions of people will do the things that bots can’t do yet, and in so doing, training the bots that will replace them. An evolutionary endgame system, from the earliest human, evolved to mankind, then devolved to ants and termites.

Facebook will gestate heroic human bots. Their mythology will be that their contribution to the artificial intelligence system saved lives from a terrorist attack or some other do-good.

Facebook has 7,500 low paid subcontractors (human bots) reading posts and private messages to find and delete content they deem objectionable and ban the people who post it. These folks are just temporary employees training the Facebook bots to come. The goal is to build AIs that can read posts and messages to identify objectionable content to do what the human team is already doing, but on a global scale. AIs that can identify violent imagery and extremist symbols in videos and pictures and rapidly delete them or block their upload.

Facebook will add a pervasive physical surveillance to their spooky platform. But that artificial intelligence also needs to be trained by experienced psychologists, intel operatives, body language experts, all need to decipher whats being seen, and whats not. And, some of those will become heroes! The intelligence will be proactive. If it finds a gap in its coverage, it can actively move cognitive sensors to cover the gap. Pushing this forward even further, as the data flows and the depth of the information increases, how far down in the stack of violence could these AIs prove to be effective, or not?

Suppose I want a killing machine autonomously managed. maybe it’s going to fight in wars or it’s gonna hunt dissidents. I want it to kill well. Maybe some people it will need to torture to get information, or just to get its Artificial Intelligence rocks off. You’re a serial killer, I hire you to go thru your precise motions, everything you do from sharpening tools, every thought in your head, every twitch of your arm, how your eyes glance, how your mind thinks in preparation, what you do afterwards, what instrument did you select and why. I’m gonna need a few more serial killers and do the same with them.

All those serial killers, and the taxi drivers and tour guides, they’ll be on statues. It’s a social currency they’ll be granted for giving away the secrets of the human race.

In a few years you’ll be celebrating them also. You’ll see their statues in the park when you’re walking your kid:

Q. “who’s that poppa?” A. “she was a great person. If it wasn’t for her we wouldn’t have that perfect loving cup of coffee. I want a strong cup in the morning with lots of sugar, then later different combos of this and that. She knows when you will be hungry and what you want to eat. You can thank Rosie!”

Q. “And who’s that pops?”A. “He blew up the electrical grid in upstate NY, kept us in the dark for 9 days. Then he was caught and killed. He’s a martyr for macro aggressive civil disobedience”